What Would Frederick Douglass Say About ‘Huckleberry Finn’?

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and a fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the author of "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future."

Updated March 10, 2011, 1:44 PM

Awhile back, after a freshman class on “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” a text amply sprinkled with n-words, a black student came up and rebuked me for one particular passage.

Take away the insult and we lose the full measure of Jim's character.

“It’s a bad word,” he said, “really upsetting.”

“I know, I know,” I replied, “but it’s there, and Douglass wrote it for a reason, and people in 1835 used it all the time.” He glanced down and shook his head. I thought of commiserating, but took a firm line.

“Listen, you’re in college now, and that’s going to put pressure on you. In many courses you’ll have to face some awful facts of history, and to handle them well you can’t let them offend you so much.”

He walked away and I never saw him again — a bad outcome for him, me, the class, and, let’s not forget, Frederick Douglass. What would Douglass think of a man who closed his book because of that word? “I’ve been torn from my mother, beaten regularly, and I’ve witnessed rape and murder,” he might say. “You can’t take the ordinary label of the day?”

Most of all, Douglass understood that dignity can endure even at the bottom of a slave society no matter the abuse. Twain did, too, showing that in spite of all the cruelty and the racial epithets, Jim remains the noble figure in the novel. Take away the insult and we lose the full measure of his character.

Worse, Alan Gribben’s hesitation over the the epithet has a terrible effect, producing the anti-intellectual attitude of many students. “I found myself right out of graduate school at Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Tom Sawyer,’” Gribben has said.

Stop being so fussy. Political correctness is bad tutelage, validating thin skins and selective inquiries. The more students read sanitized materials in high school, the more they enter college inclined to dispel things they don’t want to hear.